


The Face of God

by budgeridoo



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1930s, Child Abuse, Child Neglect, Crossover, F/M, Les Miserables - Freeform, M/M, Multi, Prostitution, everyone dies, i'm not kidding everyone dies
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 13:30:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2583158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/budgeridoo/pseuds/budgeridoo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Les Misérables fusion AU. Yao Wang, an ex-convict from the chain gang, has finished his nineteen years of servitude and, after an encounter with Mother Yekateryna Chernenko, seeks to change his life. Helena Karpusi, a young working woman with an illegitimate child, turns to prostitution to pay the people keeping him. And finally, in the city of Bendición, a group of young socialist revolutionaries prepare for a brighter future amidst poverty and ever-rising social unrest.</p><p>Contains violence, prostitution, child abuse/neglect, and massive amounts of character death. Valjean!China, Javert!America, Fantine!Ancient Greece, Cosette!Italy, Marius!Germany, Eponine!Nyo!Belarus, Thenardier!Netherlands, and Enjolras!France. Set in roughly the West Coast of the United States.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. no god above and hell alone below

In high summer, the road to Joshua Flat is not cracked, because to crack it would have had to be mud at some point. Instead it is dry dust which stirs into clouds beneath the feet and wheels of sparse traffic, bounded at the edges by dried-up crabgrass.

The road itself has changed in the decades between the events and the description, for this was before the great roads, but the surroundings have not: the dry valley in which the road travels is still surrounded by low hills burnt gold in the sun, which from afar wave as though covered with long grass and wheat, but on closer inspection prove to be short, brittle grasses beneath shining waves of heat. Between them, the road follows the curve of the short valley until the hills die away and the horizon stretches full of blue sky hazing around the edges, through which distant mountains are faintly, faintly visible.

After the hills, Joshua Flat rises from the hazy, dusty plain. It is not a terribly large town, one of those that grows on the periphery of a ranch. The buildings are roughly equally divided between off-white stucco and peeling boards, clustered around a few streets.

It is towards this town that a man walks.

He is short and wiry, black hair pulled back in a matted queue, and his clothing is nondescript at best and grimy at worst. Dust coats him — he has obviously traveled a long way, and his shoes are an indescribable shade of dust and cheap shoe polish, cracking and coming apart.

Behind him the mountains do not tower. They are not majestic, towering, craggy behemoths; instead hovering low to the ground, tan with dirt and brown-black with scrub-brush, ridged and crinkling and folded with innumerable dry stream-beds, hovered over by thin streaks of cloud either grey with dust or white and flattened. The road winds down from the sun-baked heights, smelling of aching heat and dried dust. The man, too, smells of heat and dust and sweat.

He walks straight ahead, doggedly, eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. There is a small, yellowing canvas pack slung across his back. The road is empty except for him and the small, trailing cloud of dust which adds to the shimmering heat waves on all sides. The high afternoon sun flattens everything beneath its light.

Loping straight ahead, the man heads for Joshua Flat with the determination of someone who has no other choice.

A little after six o’clock, this man enters the town of Joshua Flat. Nobody in the town recognizes him; he did not get off the train since one hasn’t made a stop here for two weeks, he’s unlikely to be a ranch-hand, he’s not related to anybody.

The man trudges into the town hall, which barely warrants the name. Five minutes after he comes back out, everybody in Joshua Flat knows exactly who he is.

There is a tiny train-stop restaurant in Joshua Flat, and it is not crowded when the man enters it. A cluster of off-work ranch-hands gather around a few tables, and flies buzz around the screen door — not too fast, even flies slow in this heat — and the cigarettes in their little cardboard boxes seem to droop next to the hard candies all stacked in the closed display case. Smells hang in the air, the desert winds have not come yet — smell of grease from the kitchen, smell of oil, smell of thousands of acres of dirt and cows up north, all move only by the swinging shut of the door after the man steps through. He sits heavily down at the counter, and the woman behind it gives him a cool, appraising look.

Dark eyes return her gaze beneath flat, foldless lids in a flat, round face. It would be rounder, but the boniness of the man’s long, thin hands and the loose hang of his dusty clothes provide some explanation. His hair is beginning to straggle out of the ponytail.

He catches the meaning of her look, and says “I can pay” in a slightly high voice. He’s already reaching into his pocket, and proof of his statement is on the counter: a handful of greasy, crumpled bills and various coins.

“’S not it,” the woman says.

“Then what?” His tone of voice is one of someone trying to keep it modulated, soft, deferential. Trying, and not entirely succeeding.

“Out of hamburger.” She knows, and the man at the counter knows, that behind her in the kitchen the cook is flipping one.

“I’ll eat the bun.”

“Those too.”

“A glass of water.” His stare hasn’t left her face once, and the stares of the ranch-hands haven’t left him.

The woman crosses her arms. “Look, we’re not serving you.”

“I can _pay_.”

“Yeah, with the money they give you when you leave the chain gang.” The man’s fingers tense on the counter, and she continues. “Heard five minutes before you came in, Yao Wang who’s coming from Port Heron and going to Alila and who better get on his way.”

Yao straightens up. “I’ve walked thirty miles, I’m thirsty, and I can pay.”

The woman glares. “Pay somewhere else, then, ‘cause I don’t serve convicts or parolees. Said on your papers you’re dangerous. So you get out, or I call the sheriff and he puts you back where you come from.” And she moves towards the phone hanging on the wall, infinitesimally, just enough that Yao notices.

Without another word, he stands, scrapes his money back into his pocket, and leaves. Flies buzz against the screen door after he shuts it, and a smell of cooking grease slips out and a smell of sunburnt grass slips in.

A few children stare at him as he makes his way down the street, and one throws a pebble, experimentally, and it misses him by several feet. Yao does not seem to notice. In a few of the peeling houses around him, cheap radios play garbled music, spilling into the twilight along with light from the cracks around the shutters.

In one of the buildings, the music is a little louder, a little less distorted, and the light mixes with the smell of something frying and with voices raised in conversation. When Yao enters, few people look at him. The proprietress glances up at him, smiles vaguely, and nods her head towards an empty chair. He sits, letting out a small sigh.

Five minutes pass, and then a man comes in the door and speaks hushedly with the woman. Their conversation punctuates itself with several glances towards Yao. Eventually, the woman stands and makes her way over to him, resting a hand on his shoulder. “You got to leave.”

Yao stares at her, sees that she knows, and does not argue. Sullenly, he gets back to his feet, and as he leaves, the entire room turns to look.

The sun has dropped fast, and the temperature with it. Yao’s clothes, too warm in the sun, are too cold for the night, and he draws the cheapjack jacket closer around him. Joshua Flat’s houses are closed now, lights less frequent, and above it the sky stretches wide — beyond the mountains, very far, one could almost fancy they saw the lights from Port Heron. Above Joshua Flat, there are stars, and there is dust.

Yao is not quite sure where he is going — he cannot keep walking through the night, at least. Perhaps, if he found somewhere out of the way enough that he wouldn’t be picked up for a vagrant, he could sleep.

A space beside the steps of some building seems likely as any other place, and Yao has slept in far worse, and he settles down in it, jacket pulled up over his head.

And then a voice wakes him: “Sir, would you like to come in?” 

* * *

 

At this point, it is imperative that the reader know some of Yekateryna Chernenko.

She was in no way a high-ranking member of a religious order, as it was, and still is, difficult to be a high-ranking anything in that county. Her parents had preached before her, both father and mother at the pulpit and voices soft with reverence, and her younger brother and sister had both left the county when they could, for somewhere where the rains came.

Yekateryna had stayed. There was work to be done.

She was not a high-flown preacher; her sermons were calm and direct and delivered in a soft voice that churchgoers would sometimes have to strain to hear. They lasted as long as was needed to get her point across, no longer. Anyone who spent the time adding up how much money was given in collections, and then comparing it with how much money was given to those who needed it, would gain some comprehension of Yekateryna.

She knew how to farm, and in her youth she had worked alongside the farmers and laborers of Joshua Flat, offering and receiving advice, and even as she aged she still would visit the fields to speak to the workers when there was time, and to assist when there was not.

There were some who questioned the wisdom of allowing a woman, hands roughened from the hoe and neck burned from the sun and ash-blonde hair cut short, to preach with dust in her cassock and eyes lightened like the hazy edges of the sky. And Yekateryna would smile, a little sadly, and ask _who else would?_ There were some who questioned the wisdom of Yekateryna living alone in the rooms next to the church, gate unlocked, and she would say that she had company, and not to worry.

Some of the older residents of Joshua Flat remembered when Yekateryna had been young, and had wept easily, but with conviction, and they knew that she still did, at vigils. She kept deathwatches and birthwatches and knew when a homily was and wasn’t needed.

The only thing of high monetary value Yekateryna Chernenko owned was a silver service given to her by the Chetters after her tenth deathwatch for them. She ate off of them occasionally, and served guests with them.

Of course, this is not to say that Yekateryna Chernenko did not have faults. All humans do, but she strove to solve the problems hers caused — the tendency to wait too long on decisions, the weakness of will that still arose sometimes, she _tried_ and therein came her conviction that others could, too, only needing to see how.

It is by the steps of her small home, next to her small church (both of which are still in Joshua Flat, though she no longer is) that Yao Wang sat to rest.

* * *

 “What?”

The woman — Yao can see that much, though not much else, she’s backlit and seems little more than a silhouette — repeats her question. “Would you like to come in, sir?”

Yao only stares dumbly at her. The invitation, the _sir_ — he had walked miles and his mouth felt fuzzy with dust and he has in his coat pocket the papers declaring him **_parolee, dangerous, breaking and entering, multiple escape attempts_** and here this woman, apparently alone, is inviting him inside and calling him “sir”.

“It gets cold here at night, you know,” and oh God Yao knows, “and you look like you need a meal.”

His eyes have adjusted a little to the light, and he squints at the woman. She is taller than him (many people are), and her short ash-blonde hair curves in towards her cheeks, and the plain high-necked nightgown she wears is covered in bright embroidery, and she holds out a blunt-fingered hand to him. “Please, come in.”

Yao stands, still mute, without touching the hand. He follows her indoors, eyes flicking to the windows and doors in case he has to — leave, suddenly. There is not much else of note in the room, only a heavy cabinet and an assortment of mismatched chairs around a dinner table.

“Sit! Sit, please,” the woman says, pulling out a chair. “I have already eaten but I can keep you company while you do, I know it does not look like much here but you need somewhere to stay.” Yao sits warily, but his caution leaves him when the woman sets a plate in front of him, still warm and full of some sort of oat porridge with onions and pork. He wolfs it down, hunched close to the plate, still making no sound beyond chewing.

He is halfway through the plate before he notices that it gleams, that it’s _silver_ , this woman is giving him hot food on a silver plate, and the unlit candlesticks on the table are silver! Still, he feigns indifference, not a hard thing when there’s still half a plate of food before him.

“You have not eaten well in a long time, have you?” The woman asks. Yao stares incredulously for a couple seconds and goes back to eating. What does she think, that on the chain gang they all had three meals a day?

Not long after, Yao has cleaned his plate, and looks up. The woman sits across the table from him, hands folded, and smiles again. “My name is Yekateryna.”

“Yao,” Yao answers. He sets down the fork. “You know I’m a convict, right?”

She nods.

“I have the papers and everything. They threw me out of the train-stop place and wouldn’t serve me before that.”

Yekateryna nods again, still smiling faintly, and Yao feels a sudden surge of anger, after so long not feeling much of anything, it doesn’t make _sense_. “Why the _hell_ did you let me in!”

“You needed a place to stay, I have an extra bed.” Her voice has not changed at all. Yao settles back, again at a loss for words.

Yekateryna only smiles again. “I think you should go to bed, Mr. Yao. You must have had a long day.” 

The enormity of this — this woman, what she offers, beats at the corners of Yao’s brain. He glances from the plate to the cabinet and back again, and at the lockless door.

“All right.” He stands. “Where is it?” 

He’ll think over this — later. Later, he’ll think. 

Yao lies down on top of the bed, without even taking off his shoes, and is asleep in seconds.

* * *

At night, he wakes, unused to the softness of a bed. Glancing out the small window, Yao guesses that it’s around two in the morning, and if he strains he can hear snoring from Yekateryna’s room.

Quiet as air, he slips out of bed and takes one of the blankets with him. He pauses at the door, thinking for a second _maybe I shouldn’t_ , but the doubt is quashed swiftly. If she invited him in, she knew the risks. He holds his breath as he opens the door, anyway. It doesn’t squeak. 

Yao makes his stealthy way across the room towards the cabinet. _That_ door, the cabinet door, does squeak, and it sounds like a trumpet call, and Yao freezes, half-madly expecting to be struck dead where he stands.

The silver service rests before his eyes, barely gleaming in the dull light of the yellow moon lancing through the windows, and Yao hastily packs the plates and serving spoons into the blanket he brought with him, glancing over his shoulder every couple seconds at the door to Yekateryna’s room. There is no sound, no movement, and he half-wishes there were so she’d _see_ , see she shouldn’t have let him in and called him sir and fed him and given him a bed against all reason, against the papers in his coat —

He bundles the blanket shut, and slings it over his shoulder, mindless now of the muffled clanks, and runs out the back door, leaps the low garden wall, and makes off into the night.


	2. see in this some higher plan

Yao Wang’s family came from a small village along the Mokou, a village which does not exist now. When he was still mostly young, he and his older sister Chunyan and her new husband moved away, across the sea to Port Heron and then south through Vallón to Hawi.

Hawi was a small and dusty place, a mountain town that had grown around now-dead mines. And around Hawi had grown orchards — apple, mostly. And Yao Wang had grown to adulthood in the orchards; he was slight enough to reach the high branches and had a good hand, and between him and his brother-in-law enough money would come in that all three — Yao, his sister, and her husband — could take care of the children.

And then, after the fourth child, Chunyan’s husband had left.

He’d said he was going to Vallón to see if there was better work — and he may well have gone to Vallón, but he hadn’t come back. He hadn’t come back and for a little while it hadn’t been so bad, despite the looks they would get, because Yao still had work in the orchards but as soon as the apple harvest was over and the cold began to set in and the clear dusty days became sharp-edged and short, it was bad and worse.

Yao and Chunyan and her children lasted that winter, on whatever small work they could scrape up, but after that she would notice how he began to draw inward. He spoke less and less, closing up even when there _was_ work to be done. His sister would sometimes take from his plate as he ate, hunched over and moving quickly — take a part of the pork shoulder, or a celery heart — and slip it into the bowl of one of her children. If he noticed, he made no sign.

The next winter was worse.

The third, worse still. No matter how hard Yao and Chunyan searched, after the apple harvest there was simply no work, and when there was no work there was no food. That was a cold winter, cold and dry so that the brown grass cracked and broke underfoot and the live oak rattled in the late winds. There was no work, and there was no food, and four children to feed. They sold what they could spare, they ate boiled cattail root, and manzanita flowers, and thistle root, and once or twice a scrawny jackrabbit, and it was nowhere near enough.

Yao still spoke little, round face hard and beginning to be lined.

One night, a particularly cold one, the baker of Hawi woke to the sound of splintering glass. He rushed downstairs and caught a glimpse of a hand pulling a loaf of half-stale bread out through the shattered window and gave chase to the owner of the hand, bellowing for the police. After a few blocks, he managed to run the man down — he’d thrown away the loaf, but his arm still bled through his shirt.

Yao Wang was tried for breaking and entering, theft, and resisting arrest. He was an immigrant, and his English was still not fluent, this injured his case. By February, Yao Wang was convicted and sentenced to five years on a chain gang. He was put in the chains and stripes, he was no longer Yao Wang from Mokou but VL-5354, taken through to Vallón and then east over the chaparral and the mountains, away from Hawi and Chunyan and her children.

Yao wept, once, about a hundred miles out of Vallón, unable to speak.

He did not hear from them again. They left Hawi, and Hawi forgot them, and their home forgot them, and even Yao forgot them after some years on the chain gang. Only once did he ever hear of them — Chunyan was in Vallón, he heard near the beginning of his fourth year of the sentence. She had one child with her, a girl, the second-youngest. No word of the other three. She worked early shifts in a laundry, and the girl, not more than seven, would sit in the doorway of the building because the other workers didn’t like having her inside; she was in the way too often, they said. This is all Yao heard of them; they talked to him of it for a day and then there was no more. He never had more information of them, never found them, and they did not appear again.

By the end of his fourth year on the chain gang, his chance came to escape. The rest of the prisoners assisted him as best they could, and for two days he was free. Free, in the sense that a small hunted animal is free, always looking over his shoulder at the red desert, afraid of everything — the slide of stones as a small snake moved, the whirr of quail and towhee, the night, the day. At the end of the second day, when he was recaptured, he had not slept for a day and a half at least, and for this he had three years added to his sentence — eight years, in all.

In the sixth year of his sentence, he tried again, not exactly out of hope to escape (the sun, the work, the heat ground them all down) but simply of some instinct, and when he was found that night he tried to fight the guard. Escape and assault upon an officer of the law — five years added to his sentence. Thirteen. The tenth year, he tried again, three years added, sixteen.

The chain gang had moved around a little in this time, as their work — track for a new railroad line, a new road — moved, but still the red desert stretched around them, wind-carved, not sandy but instead full of rock and brush and low grass, and the sun _hammered_ down in the white sky.

Yao made one last attempt, pure instinct, in the thirteenth year of his sentence, and was retaken after four hours. Three years added again, for those four hours.

In May, nineteen years after Yao Wang, VL-5354, was arrested for breaking a window and stealing a loaf of bread, he was released. They put him on a train to Port Heron, in an old suit and still under guard. They told him that he had two months to get to Alila, or he’d be breaking parole. When Yao Wang was put on that train, he had not cried in nineteen years.

* * *

Over those nineteen years, between the work, the pitiless sun and the pitiless guards, the vast red desert, Yao began to harden as his hands hardened from the pick and his face from the wind. During the rests they received, Yao would think, eyes narrowed against the glare, formless hat pulled low over his face, sweat-soaked prison stripes and the chain fixed around his ankle and calf.

Yao Wang put himself on trial.

He had committed a crime, definitely — how many people died of hunger, specifically of hunger? Few. He could have waited, and didn’t stealing the bread mean Chunyan’s children were worse off since he was gone?

But should he have _had_ to? The crime was that he was driven to this, the crime was nineteen years in total for one loaf of bread.

The crime, Yao decided, was not his, and within him a great and formless anger began to grow, an anger that he whetted and fed on throughout his imprisonment, his labor. When it was possible, he learned to read a little and write a little, still from anger more than anything else, out of a sort of spite for the rest of the world. He spoke little, if at all; his escape attempts were coyote-like, simply from seeing an opportunity and with no reflection.

The guard with him on the train to Port Heron had at least a head and a half on him, blond hair and blue eyes and glasses. He slouched in his seat, whistling loudly from time to time, facing Yao with one hand not _quite_ next to the holster on his hip. Yao remembers him, vaguely, from among the chain-gang guards, but all of those have blurred together into one figure, holding a gun, astride a horse.

“Right,” he’d said as the train wheezed and slowed. “You’re on parole now.”

Yao nodded slowly.

“For life.”

Yao only stared, at that. “Why?”

The guard shrugged. “Thief.”

Schooling his voice carefully to a low monotone, Yao replied “It was _one_ loaf of bread.”

“Breaking and entering, repeated escape attempts, some violent. No more than you deserve, really.” Something rose in Yao’s throat, and the guard only stared back guilelessly. “Hope you’ve learned your lesson, though considering how much you ran I kinda doubt it myself. ‘S not my place to say, though.” The train juddered to a final stop. “Free to go, Vee-El-Five-Three-Five-Four.”

One of Yao’s hands clenched, minutely, at the way the guard drew out every syllable. “ _Yao Wang_.”

The guard lifted his chin a little. “Jones, Alfred F. Officer.” He waved his hand shortly. “Free to go. Best remember me, especially if you’re planning on running, ‘cause I’m faster.” And then he frowned, seemingly more from confusion than anything else. “Free to _go_ , I said, don’t you listen?”

Yao went. 

* * *

We have seen the events at Joshua Flat, up to a point.

In the morning, when the sun is still weak, there comes a knocking on Yekateryna’s door. She is already awake, and has been for several hours.

“Found your silver,” says one of the officers, and the other adds “Caught him with it ‘bout a mile outta town.” Yao stands — rather, sways — between them, hands cuffed behind his back, a large bruise already beginning to color his face. He eyes Yekateryna with something approaching defiance, though dulled.

The first officer holds out the blanket full of silver to her. “He had the b — the guts to say you gave him this.” He tightens his other hand on Yao, his blunt, sunburned face still on Yekateryna. Something in his face appears to be about to say _can you believe_. Yao curls one fist behind his back, ready for her to see she was _wrong_ , shouldn’t have let him in.

She smiles. “I did.” Both officers go silent, and one of them glances at the other for a second. “And, friend, why did you leave these?” Yekateryna steps quickly to the table and picks up the heavy candlesticks. “You could easily receive thirty dollars for them, at least.”

Yao stares at her, unblinking, disbelieving — is this preacher-woman _insane_? The officers also stare. One of them opens his mouth a fraction, then quickly shuts it. He then says “So — so he wasn’t lying.”

Yekateryna shakes her head, just once, and the officers move to uncuff Yao, hastily departing with a “sorry to bother you, Mother Chernenko.” Shakily, slowly, Yao takes the candlesticks in hand when Yekateryna proffers them.

She steps close to him, laying her hands on his shoulders, and says lowly, “Mr. Yao, you should not forget that you must use the money from selling these to become honest.” He remains speechless, mouth too dry to say anything, and Yekateryna Chernenko fixes her light eyes on his and continues, “You must remember that. You must promise, to God, to whoever you believe in. I have bought your soul out of darkness, and you must keep it.” 

Yao does not answer — he thinks he might nod, but he can’t tell — and his knees tremble as though they will give out any second. The candlesticks are heavy in his hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Mokou is an actual river in southern China (Fujian province), but I don’t trust myself to make up locations that’d be named in a language I don’t speak. Hawi is very loosely based on Julian, CA, but its name comes from the Kumeyaay name for the place where the ghost town of Vallecito is now.
> 
> Chunyan is nyo!China.
> 
> Cattail root, manzanita leaf/flower, and thistle leaf/root are all edible, but nobody eats them for the taste.
> 
> 5354 is an unlucky number combination in Cantonese — 不生不死, sounding like “not alive, not dead”.
> 
> In real life, chain gangs in the United States were mostly centered in the South and almost entirely made up of black prisoners (there’s a good resource here, http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/themes/chain-gangs). Obviously, changes have been made to historical continuity in this. (As an aside, chain gangs of a sort have been reintroduced in America, most notably by Sheriff Arpaio of Maricopa County, AZ.)


	3. what spirit comes to move my life

Yao Wang fairly flees Joshua Flat, northward along the road to Alila. He does not stop for at least a mile, and then continues walking, until the silver in the bag on his back grows too heavy. When Joshua Flat is a smudge on the horizon, wavering in the heat, he sets the bag on the side of the road and sits down next to it, stirring a small cloud of grit and dust as he does.

He shudders, though the heat is baking across his back.

What has he _done_? 

* * *

 

The object of a prison, of a chain-gang, is, at the end, to break the prisoner. To bear them down beneath the weight of the chain, the guards, the lost years, the unending work. To take people and make them coyotes, to take a man — as Yao Wang was taken — and _twist_ until there is nothing left, and yet this process does leave things behind. It leaves the people whom it has battered, and it leaves hate.

Yao Wang was left hate. Hate for the guards, hate for the judge and jury, hate for himself for being turned into this coyote-man who would steal from a woman who offered him shelter and succor, hate for the world that had done nothing but grind him small and swallow his sister, his nieces and nephews.

Yao Wang was left hate, and it churns inside his belly, hot as the sticky asphalt of the road to Alila and with the acrid smell of tar in his nostrils. Something else also rolls in his stomach — guilt, fear, regret knotted into a ball that pulls and pulls and pulls at his insides.

What has he _done_?

Yekateryna Chernenko had had every right to turn him back over to the officers. She had had every reason — she’d taken Yao in and he’d repaid her like _that_ and she’d had every right and reason to not even allow him in in the first place, and yet. And yet. She had.

She had shown him kindness, had _trusted_ him — _him_ — and why?

 _Become honest_ , she had said. Yao doesn’t know if he can. If the chain-gang had left that in him, if there was anything in him that could ever turn from the red desert and white sun and the guards on horseback as they broke rocks and laid roads. If there is any way out from this, from what he is now, a life on parole where nobody would extend a hand.

(And yet, Yekateryna had.)

How did she know if he could? Yao could, right now, stand back up and take the bag of silver and sell it off and that money would last for a while, and then it would run out, and nobody would hire a man who was **_parolee, dangerous_**. And what then? Stealing, again, and for nobody but him, and for no reason but to live, and the chain-gang again until nothing was left. What made her think that Yao Wang could escape — ever escape from this?

The sun climbs higher in the hazy sky, and the wind shifts until it carries the smell of creosote from the foothills. Yao narrows his eyes against the glare, thoughts chasing themselves through his head.

The chain gang had taken Yao Wang, changed and twisted him — and Yao Wang had stolen from Yekateryna, which seemed to him now to be the greatest of his crimes — and Yao Wang would steal, would continue to be forced to steal and to steal when there was no force, dogged always by the yellow papers in his pocket, and the only way out —

—   the only way out was for Yao Wang to be gone.

Without realizing it, Yao had taken the papers out of his pocket, and he stares at them now, hands steady in their grip. “Parole for life” stares back, and “dangerous convict”. Yao bows his head, and lets out a long and near-silent sigh.

Two days later, a young ranch-hand who sits on the back of the rattling truck that drives them all up to Axel sees, amid the cloud of dust raised by its wheels, several scraps of yellow paper fluttering in the early sun. He thinks it odd at first, but by the time the truck reaches Axel he decides they must have been dropped by someone coming home last night, and does not think on it further.


End file.
